HIPPIES!

With the Florida Coven of the Republican Party making the Visigoths look like Cub Scouts these days; arguing that a prohibition of "Dwarf Tossing " is destroying American jobs, I think I'm more than justified in a certain lack of restraint when describing the moral character of that party as having everything to do with gaining power by any and all means, and having nothing whatever to do with making the US a real Democracy. These days it's as much about making the news a series of passion plays meant to obscure and often reverse the facts as it has been about suppressing votes and Gerrymandering.

The practice of dirty tricks has come a long way since Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick used the media to convince us that the media was lying and that the vast and silent majority was a small and unpatriotic minority. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the confidence level that allows them to strongly support something one day and denounce it in hyperbolic tirades on the next according to tactical needs.

It's possible to denounce Wall Street brokers and banks; insist that we let them die and scream about it in the streets with tea bags stapled to three-cornered hats, yet support the same corrupt and unpunished entities passionately by denouncing the same sentiments; associating them with "hippies" in fine old 1968 style two generations after the last real hippie got a haircut and went to work on Wall Street.

And yes, you're damned right that Fox News is the Joseph Goebbels of the new Right. You'll remember how ACORN was smeared and destroyed by patched together video, You'll remember fake video made to look like millions were at Republican rallies, but you're less likely to remember that fake video was used by Brit Hume to denounce Iraq war protesters in 2003 as "hippies" -- Protesting the Protesters documentary and other fake documentaries like Indoctrinate U that was intended to show how righteous "conservatives" were being censored at those hotbeds of hippieism, the Universities. You may then not be surprised that the same saboteur behind those atrocities, one Evan Coyne Maloney, has been at work on the sidewalks of New York, handing out rolling papers with pictures of Che Guevara and bongs so that the recipients can be filmed with them and another invidious documentary can be patched together so that we can be Foxed again.

Never mind that the streets are filled with veterans and economists, businessmen and others who demand respect and deserve to be heard, Fox wants them out of the way and can think of no better way than to dredge up hoary straw men in tie-died T-shirts. Look! that investment banker, that war veteran, that Nobel Prize winning economist: HIPPIES! COMMIES! DRUG FIENDS! HATERS OF OUR SACRED CAPITALIST VALUES!

Has any nation been able to stand; been able to avoid catastrophe, been able to maintain the illusion of freedom under such an internal assault?